1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to an image search apparatus, an image search method and a storage medium, and more particularly to an image search apparatus, and an image search method that are suitable for managing and searching images by assigning keywords representing the images, and a storage medium storing a program for executing the image control and search method.
2. Description of Related Art
There is a conventional image database management technique of storing image data in a database and searching the stored image data. In the conventional image database management, keywords are assigned to images, and desired images can be searched for depending on the accordance of the keywords with search terms. According to an image searching process using this technique, even if a search term inputted by an operator does not completely match a keyword, the search term is made to match the keyword by replacing the search term with a term similar to the search term in notation, a synonym and a narrower term. This reduces the possibility that the image is not searched out due to the discord between the keyword and the search term.
The above conventional technique, however, has a problem as described below. In the conventional image database management, it is almost impossible for all images to be represented by keywords. Some keywords represent predominant objects in images, and some keywords represent minor objects that appear in images but do not form subjects of the images. If the images are searched for by the keywords in such image management system, all the images to which a keyword matching the inputted search term is assigned are searched out. More specifically, an image whose subject is the keyword and an image which appears as a small image at the edge of an image are searched out. Therefore, it takes a long time for a searcher to reach a desired image.